the long view

Recently I walked into a room in a flat in Hackney and in very short order found myself holding in my hands a tiny naked person less than an hour old who was barely covered by a skimpy green towel and in urgent need of a number of things, including warmth, food, safety, and a bit of a cleanup in the arse region. In spite of the fact that it was precisely in order to help provide these things that I was present, (not to mention my supposed fitness for the job on the grounds of having produced and raised two such tiny beings of my own),I couldn’t quite believe that anyone would trust me to do something so momentous without strict supervision. There was a period of, oh, about 15 seconds there where I just stood with this scrap of life in both hands looking around stupidly for a suitable surface to put her down on while I located the cleaning materials. Shortly afterwards there was the overwhelming sensation of wrongness about defiling the beauty of such a perfect work of nature by enclosing her tail end in a newborn Pampers. I can tell you it was with a sense of some relief that I located a suitable blanket, wrapped her up warmly, and tiptoed cautiously back downstairs to hand her back to her mum and dad. Like having successfully passed on the baton in a very short relay race. But then, meeting my grandchildren for the first time has always felt a bit like that.

People tell you how great it is to be a grandparent but exactly as with parenthood, you don’t get it until it happens to you. I will just say that one of the many very excellent things about having children is the arrival of the grandchildren. Not least of the joys grandchildren bring is the chance to ponder anew, up close and personal and with much less fear and trepidation (remember, you’ve passed the baton) the mystery of it all, as you meet that thousand-yard stare that seems to see beyond you and all the way back to wherever it is they’ve just come from.

Sitting in the sun on a quiet afternoon while the new mum grabbed a little sleep and the newborn did the same in my arms, I thought about my own granny and did a few computations and came up with a surprising realization.

I remember my maternal granny well. She lived with us and was one of the most important people in my life until about the age of 12. She was born in the 19th century, in 1892 . I inherited from her a little book of National Savings Certificates, containing stamps valued at 2 shillings and sixpence or 5 shillings, which she bought and licked and stuck for me around the middle of the 20th century, when I was less than one year old. I have given that book to my own first granddaughter in the hope that it might yet bring in a Premium Bond win for her some day. Now, nearly ten years on, in the second decade of the 21st century, here is my second granddaughter. With my grandson, aged almost 5, I have the joy of knowing well and loving three people who, it is reasonable to hope, will see in the 22nd century. In my lifetime I will have loved five generations of my family whose lifespans, taken together, could well take in four centuries.
And you know what ? It kind of, almost, makes me feel a little bit immortal.

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Are we sitting there yet ?

It’s nearly two years since I began this blog with ‘Don’t just do something, sit there’ as my theme. I had such high hopes at that time that having finally screwed up the courage to walk away from my Real Job and trust my financial survival to doing odd jobs in the invisible economy, I would at last begin to find time to do that Zen thing and get back in touch with the real me. This would entail really learning to Sit There, to stop taking action all the time and instead watch the world pass by while growing in serenity and inner wisdom.  

Well, two years on, anyone who knows me would be falling over laughing at the magnitude of my failure to get anywhere close to learning to Sit There. There’s little doubt that the last two years have been among the most active and busy of my
life to date. If you follow the blog you can see that after a couple of blissful months I went silent (because I was doing so many things I had no time to blog), and then my mum got ill and I was busy with that, and then the tsunami came along and for reasons now mysterious even to me I got frantically involved in a fund-raising campaign relating the tsunami aftermath to, of all things, FOOTBALL – and in the midst of all this I sort of accidentally fell back into a Real Job which was just too convenient, comfortably paid and close to home for me to pass it up – and now two years on the storm of events just keeps on coming and I feel further than ever from ever being able to Sit There. Of course a day will come when my own body will give me no choice but to Sit There, but waiting for that is not what I had in mind when I started.

I read a synopsis of Zen today (yes, the BBC has the effrontery to offer a synopsis of Zen – you gotta love the BBC) which said that all human nature is Buddha nature and that Zen just means recognizing that to be a human being is to be a Buddha. Buddha nature is just another name for human nature – true human nature. Recognizing this, we can achieve true happiness.

Is it possible that my true human nature is simply this – to be this forever frantically busy, over-committed person rushing about trying not very successfullyto do everything at once and please everyone at once? It’s certainly true that these years have been not only busy but among the happiest I can remember. My capacity for happiness seems to have expanded in the last two years. And I’ve been able to get away from the stranglehold that, as I can now recognise, alcohol had developed on my days and thoughts. I’ve been able to share moments with my family which, stressful as some have seemed to be at the time, have enriched my life in very significant ways. The last two years haven’t made me a better person but they have also not made me a worse one, in the way that my years spent at the Real Job, especially the ones in the Global Banks, were undoubtedly doing.
It’s a start, anyway.

Onagawa Yomigaeru

Yes, I know you can’t speak Japanese.  Just watch the video.  The driver started filming about three miles out from the sea and kept on going.  This was the busy fishing port of Onagawa.  The wave here can be seen  to have reached 90 feet above sea level. Onagawa has received much less publicity than other Miyagi towns, partly because it no longer exists and half the population are missing, so there’s not much to say.   I have decided to start a fund to help rebuild Onagawa.  It will be called ‘Phoenix Onagawa’ (or Onagawa Yomigaeru in Japanese).    and also see this wonderful blog post for more about the kind of town this is and its youth football team, Onagawa Cobaltore: http://northernleagueday.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/whats-the-point-of-a-football-club/

Update: thanks to the author of that blog, I helped to start a website with a much better name.  It’s Onagawasupporters.com.  Please see it HERE , and you can also follow it on Facebook or Twitter. 

memories of Rikuzen-Takata

I can’t think of anything to say about what has happened to these people and places so instead I am just posting some pictures. These are photos of what Rikuzen-Takata, Onagawa, Ofunato, and the coast near Kesennuma used to look like. If you watch the news or look at satellite pictures now you wouldn’t recognize them, but this is what Miyagi prefecture and Iwate prefecture looked like when we spent two happy weeks there in the spring of 2006.
がんばれ　東北　！

Update: I decided that  just saying “how sad this is” is not enough.  I have co-founded a website to help Tohoku people rebuild their lives.  Please see it  here:

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http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html#donation

fearful symmetry

Mums are superhuman, aren’t they.  This is a truth universally acknowledged by 3-year olds, but if we live fortunate lives, it is not until very late in our own day that this particular bit of world foundation crumbles.  When I hit the wall on this one quite recently, it took less than a month from exulting publicly on Facebook about how much in awe of my mum I still was/am, to providing the care you would give a baby to that same mum.  Things are much better now, but there has been an irreversible change.  As I attempted to practice Sit-There discipline while mum struggled back from the dream world of infection-induced delirium, I had lots of time to think about writing this blog, but none at all to actually write it.  Then we had science-fiction-style snow, and Christmas, and then I absent-mindedly went out and got a job, about which more later.   I will try to summarize what I’ve learned so far.

Thing One (that I’ve learned):

The onset of serious illness in the mid-80s is something everyone thinks they are prepared for but in fact most people, including the octogenarians themselves, are not.  The remote village where my mum lives is full of people, some living together, some living alone, who are right on the borderline of being able to take care of themselves. The big division among these people is not between those who have families and those who don’t. Those in the second group are obliged to accept residential care earlier than those in the first group, but that is not the significant difference.  The big division is between those whose family and social network is strong enough to keep them going against the odds in independent life, and those where that network can’t handle the strain.   Call me naive, but only now have I begun to realize what a challenge this is going to be.

Quite by accident, I was with mum when she suddenly became ill and right there and     then,  I found myself staring straight down the gunbarrel of everyone’s assumption     that, as the daughter, I would (a) stay and be her carer for as long as necessary and     (b) be able to handle the sacrifice of my own life and timetable which this would     involve.  (I’m sure my brother felt it too but this is MY blog )  By “everyone” I don’t  mean my own children, siblings or grandchildren.  I mean the GP, the locum, the paramedics, the receptionist, all the neighbours, the consultant, the junior doctor, the  nurses, the occupational therapist, the Social Service workers, and the close personal friend of mum who is himself struggling with memory loss and the need to give up     driving his beloved car before he kills himself and/or someone else.   It was some help  to be reminded that everybody who reaches their 60s with surviving parents is in exactly the same boat sooner or later ~ BUT.  I was not at all ready for this.

* Here’s an example.  When I finally managed to get a doctor out to see mum who  was able to recognize that she had something considerably worse than seasonal flu,  he called an ambulance right away and then moved on to his next patient.  Mum was  delirious, but she realized that we wanted her to go to hospital.  She did not want to go.  She hid in the shower and countered all efforts to persuade her out (by me, her friend, and the paramedics).  Finally the ambulance crew pointed out that they could  not force her to go, and suggested they would go round the corner for 15 minutes while I talked her into it.  All four of the people in the house looked at me.  “Will she     travel ?” asked the ambulance driver.  This was my responsibility !  I would have to  persuade my delirious, imperious, superhuman mother to do something she hated,     and nobody else could do it for me !   Since I had no means of time travel into a future     where the problem would be solved, I had no option but to say “Yes”.  And she did     travel, but now she has no memory of it.  In fact, she reports having no memory     whatsoever of anything that happened over a period of almost a month, during which     we had to make major decisions on her behalf and provide her with intimate personal     care.   This is role reversal with a vengeance.

Thing Two

The various kinds of deterioration – both physical and psychological – which are for almost all of us an inevitable consequence of advanced old age are very, very hard and painful to confront.  It’s hard to look them in the eye, whether you are the person involved or that person’s children.  For the previously-independent, self-reliant individual involved, the loss of control is so painful that some associated memory loss is probably a blessing.  For that individual’s children – and here I speak purely for myself – there is a very frightening insight into what may now be only a decade or two into our own future.  As with classical tragedy, the two ingredients of Pity and Terror are powerfully present.  When my dad was only 73, he died quite rapidly from cancer.   That was one kind of process which at the time seemed appalling, but the period of powerlessness which he experienced was mercifully short – a mere five days.  With mum, we have had a four-week preview of what may last much longer.  Now that she has made a full recovery, nearly everyone, mum included, is in a sort of denial that she was ever really that ill.  But she was, and there are consequences from that.

Thing Three

Once you start to confront these realities, you begin to get a profound sense of the symmetry of our lives.  We all begin helpless, dependent on the love of family and the strength of the wider social network to support us and get us launched, and as the final decades wind down we return to that dependence, one way or another.   I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but our generation – the much-mocked Baby Boomers – really is the first in human history where it’s routine to have strong social ties and responsibilities stretching across at least four generations and spanning both our parents and our grandchildren.  We get to witness and, if we are lucky, assist at many arrivals and departures, and in so doing we have some awesome opportunities to contemplate where we ourselves fit into this circle, or wave, or whatever the hell the scary thing is that we call living.

Last Thing

When things at large are terrible, there are still pleasures in small things.  In mum’s and my case, it was starlings.  Each evening we saw them passing, clearly going home to roost.  Now that mum is better, I have found out where that roost is, and last week we went there and watched the roost.  It was transcendentally beautiful. 

Here

is what it looked like.

Sit there masterclass

On Naxos, we visited the village of Chalki at the foot of Mount Zas.  This was our sole attempt at ‘seeing the island’ en famille since the beach was too gorgeous for all of us to abandon it at the same time.  As we walked down the steep gradient into Chalki we came to this spot.  A very old, white-haired man was sitting in THIS chair, attended by a sleeping cat. 

deserted chair in Chalki

I could see at once that he was a sit-there expert and could teach me a thing or two on that subject.  However, no sooner had I whipped out my handy mobile talking-playing-messaging-gaming-picturetaking device than both he and the cat more or less dematerialized – at any rate, when I looked up from fiddling with the thing to take his picture, he was no longer there. 

This, I think, was the lesson he was teaching.  I was clearly not yet even a padawan learner in the art of sitting there.

Σιγά-Σιγά

Starting from Monday I will be doing as much nothing as possible while staying on the Cycladic island of Naxos with my lovely daughter and her family.

The trip will start with 4 hours of sitting there on the train on the way to Brighton (Hove, actually) followed by more sitting on the plane to Athens and (this is the best bit) the ferry from Piraeus.

I have fond memories of the last time I did this, in July 1968. At that time there was a hit pop song called Σιγά-Σιγά by a French singer, Ricardo Credi , backed by ‘Vangelis Papathanassiou and his Orchestra’.  Yes, THAT Vangelis.  I mention this here because  ‘Σιγά-Σιγά’ is a Greek phrase meaning something very similar to ‘slow down’, ‘take it easy’ or ‘what’s the rush’, and is a very good motto for this blog.  It’s pronounced, more or less, ‘cigar cigar’.

While doing Σιγά-Σιγά on Naxos it is very likely that I won’t blog at all.  I will just sit there  on this beach, accumulating points.  Or I might do some snorkelling.